Lawrence Hill

The regional winners for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize have been announced; for Canada and the Caribbean, the Best Book is Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. For an interesting look at the real-life document which inspired the novel (a ledger listing Black Loyalists who sailed from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783), check out Lawrence Hill’s article in The Beaver.

Hill’s novel is now in the running to be the overall Commonwealth winner — it’s up against books from Nigeria, India, and Australia:

(Laidlaw Library already has Animal’s People, and I’ve just ordered the other two contenders.)

The Best First Book prize for Canada and the Caribbean was won by The End of the Alphabet, CS Richardson’s novel about a man who finds out he only has a month to live and decides “to travel the world in a pilgrimage through the alphabet, from Amsterdam to Zanzibar.”